Women make the holidays happen, even as policymakers undermine the programs meant to support families.
As you read this, I hope you are doing so surrounded by friends and family, perhaps enjoying a brief respite from work, school or daily life. Holidays are a wonderful time to gather, and community is all the more important in times like this, when so much is at stake and basic freedoms and rights feel so tenuous for so many of us.
We recognize that so much of what makes these holidays possible is the labor of women: handling the logistics of flights and travel, cooking meals, cleaning, even facilitating discussions and smoothing over tricky family dynamics at the dinner table. This is not invisible labor—not to us.
Women often do this labor with little to no support from the systems that were meant to support them.
Just look at the recent SNAP crisis, in which policymakers used food assistance as a political weapon, leaving millions of families—especially Black and brown women-led households, single mothers working multiple jobs and people with disabilities and their caregivers (many of whom are women)—without reliable nutrition, all while forcing them to navigate complex eligibility rules and frustrating bureaucratic processes. This crisis echoes decades of policy decisions that have held food stamps hostage to ideological battles in Congress, as working poor families juggle stagnant wages, inflexible schedules and inadequate safety-net support.
To make matters worse, the fight over the Affordable Care Act tax credits is floundering, with callous Republican lawmakers (whose health insurance isn’t at stake) making decisions that affect millions of Americans.
Inevitably, women will be the ones who have to pick up the caregiving slack, should families no longer be able to afford insurance. As Erum Naqvi wrote in Ms. this month, “Caregiving is a beautiful act, rooted in security and love for others, but without real support, it becomes unsustainable.”
Even still, this holiday season, I’m feeling grateful for you: our readers, subscribers and supporters, who continue to show up and support feminist reporting year in and year out with your clicks, your voices, your attention and your dollars.
As you celebrate the holidays with your community, we hope you know that you are also a part of our community—a feminist community. A community that stretches across borders, generations and lifetimes. A community of resistance to attacks on our rights by authoritarians. And a community where we commit to sustaining each other even in times as challenging as these.
Great Job Kathy Spillar & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
